Due to the increasing demand for more data storage, heat assisted or energy assisted magnetic recording concepts have been pursued as ways to achieve higher density magnetic recording well over a Terabit/in2 in media design. Among the many available magnetic materials, FePt is often chosen as one of the suitable materials for a magnetic recording layer. This material is shown to have a desired thermal gradient near the Curie point for heat assisted magnetic recording.
To achieve magnetic material (e.g., FePt, FePd) with high densities, non-magnetic segregants (e.g., C, Cr, B, SiO2, TiO2, Cr2O3, Ag, BN, V2O5, ZrO2, Nb2O5, HfO2, Ta2O5, WO3, MgO, B2O3, ZnO, etc.) can be added in order to attain smaller grain sizes of the magnetic material with sufficiently low grain size distributions (e.g., <20%). Carbon has been found to be one of the effective additives which shows the above mentioned properties. However, as the grain sizes get smaller, it becomes difficult to make the magnetic recording layer thicker. For example, in an FePt—C system, a ratio t/D (where t is the thickness, and D is the grain diameter) is found to be limited to approximately 1. This leads to severe reduction in read-back amplitude and hence poor recording performance at high densities. Therefore, it is desirable to improve the performance of existing magnetic recording layers and methods for forming the same.